A resource used by the CMU research community to obtain high quality images in a tightly controlled and yet flexible environment. A wide choice of lighting and video cameras including a cooled, very-low-noise photometrics camera are available. A six degree of freedom jig permits the cameras to be accurately positioned under computer control, and a rail and turntable permit control of an object's position.

The lab has been used to study color, texture and illumination and the impact of these on computer vision tasks such as estimating surface orientation, object segmentation and physical model creation. It has also been used to calibrate cameras (an implementation of Tsai's calibration technique is available), and to take images of objects for stereo and 3D shape reconstruction.